It was my honor and privilege to be one of the speakers at a Ladies Day event yesterday hosted by the Bridgewater Church of Christ (at Garretson Rd) . The theme of the event was “Do You Know Who I Am?” and my topic was “Happy, Healthy and Free”. This is a subject very near and dear to my heart because I am very passionate about health and fitness for the WHOLE person Mind, Body, Soul and Spirit.

The starting point for my talk was the Bible verse Luke 2:52

Jesus grew in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and Man.

That verse encapsulates the entire 18 year period of Jesus’ growth from age 12 to the beginning of his ministry at the age of 30. It tells us that He grew mentally, physically, spiritually and socially. And I propose that we too need to focus on growing in these areas of our lives in order to be well-rounded individuals. I proposed how, instead of Happy, Healthy and Free, we are often Sick, Stressed and Depressed. This is something with which I am familiar because I have been all three of those things at certain points in my life. I shared some of what I have learned about the Mind-Body connection and how our bodies respond to stress. And lest anyone think that focusing on our own health is somehow self-indulgent, I argued that we NEED to work at our health in order to become more pleasing and useful to God.

What we think, we become. And just as the Lao Tzu quote expresses, our habits become our character which becomes our destiny. With that in mind, and through my own experiences, I have come up with Ten Healthy Habits for the Well-Rounded Person:

During my presentation I was able to go into some detail on each of these topics. But there was not nearly enough time to get into as much depth as I would have liked. In fact, based on the very positive response, I am motivated to start a series that delves further into each of these topics. Not surprisingly, I am not the only one who has been Sick, Stressed and Depressed! So many people came up to me yesterday talking about their own stories that I realized how important it is to share more about what I have learned.

There were some requests for copies of my presentation so I will post that below (in two parts because of the size of the file). These are PDFs of the presentation itself without the notes. So stay tuned for upcoming posts where I will share each Healthy Habit in more depth. You may wish to subscribe to Paleo Spirit to make sure you never miss a post.